Ever since I first played Final Fantasy Tactics way back in the day I have been a fan of Strategy RPGs and from that moment to this point I have played a lot of them, one series of which quickly became one of my favorites, Fire Emblem. Even though I have been calling myself a fan, I had up until recently only played two titles and much of the reason for this was because I didn’t want to mess around with permadeath. Recently, however, I decided to toughen up and do what fans do: revisit some of the older titles of the franchises they like, and that’s what I did.
To give some context, at least about Fire Emblem, I stand in this new crowd of fans that started with Fire Emblem Awakening on the Nintendo 3DS. I played it on normal and without permadeath, like I mentioned briefly above as I did not want to deal with it. I loved the game to death, easily among my favorites in the 3DS library, if not first place it is at least tied or closely second with Shin Megami Tensei IV as number one.
Even though unchallenging, Fire Emblem Awakening was a lot of fun, so for my next game in the series I wanted to try a little harder and when Fire Emblem Fates came with two games, one more akin to Awakening called Birthright and the other one more akin to the classic games called Conquest, I decided to go for the latter to have an experience as close as possible to the one old Fire Emblem fans would have. This time I even played on hard as I was confident but I once more disable permadeath. I had a great time time with Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest on hard with permadeath disabled. It was challenging at times but nothing out of the ordinary. If memory serves me right I only had my units “die” two times in the entire game. These would be the times where I would restart the game should permadeath have been enabled, but thankfully it wasn’t and my playthrough was smooth and fun from beginning to end.
Years have passed since I played these games. I could not play Fire Emblem: Shadows of Valentia when it was released for whatever reason and I missed the launch of Fire Emblem: Three Houses because I did not have a Switch (Now I finally have both the console and the game but I’ll play it later this year).
I think part of me wanted to play Three Houses after having more experience with the series to really just appreciate it a bit more and this was the decision that made me want to play two older games: Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, originally released for the Gameboy Advance, which I played on my 3DS and Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, which I played on my DS.
To start let’s with the one I played first, Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones.
This will not be a proper review of neither of the games I’ll mention specifically but I do feel like I want to share how much I enjoyed them.
To my surprise, is sometimes criticized for having a simple plot and allowing the player to grind for levels on the world map. To be honest, even if the plot is nothing to write home about I had fun with it, honestly. I enjoyed the characters, specially the protagonists. their struggle and their relationship with some of the people they will have to fight against.
The sprites for the game are lovely, truly gorgeous in my eyes, so pretty in fact that if I come back one day for another Fire Emblem with permadeath I’ll prioritize the Gameboy Advance games for graphics alone. The characters move with fluidity, when you managed to get a critical hit the animation changes and they make the fights much more fun.
The music was very good as well. It didn’t have a spectacular theme like the one in Fire Emblem Fates but I still think that is not something you hear everyday and for the most part the soundtrack is good.
There was one thing however I did not enjoy in Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones: PERMADEATH.
Now, before I rant about this mechanic I will try to explain briefly “permadeath” it is. In some games when you have many characters to use, recruit or similar, the game may employ a mechanic in which when they are killed by the enemy instead of going down for the turn, or until revived with and item (or spell), temporarily unavailable for a few mission and any variant of those, the character is dead for good for the rest of the game.
To be fair before sharing my complains Fire Emblem is far from the only game to have this, like mentioned and to be fair I’ve played many games with permadeath, the thing is which it bothers me so much in Fire Emblem is because you have no way to rectify your mistake in a timely manner. Let me give you some examples.
In Final Fantasy Tactics when your characters die, a countdown starts above their heads and you have that many turns to either clear the level or resurrect them. Same thing in Tactics Ogre. In Valkyria Chronicles you have to reach the spot that character fell with another character and a medic will pull them out of battle, to safety.
You can even make a comparison to other games that also have permadeath in a similar way Fire Emblem does like X-COM or Darkest Dungeon but in my opinion there is one huge difference among those titles and Fire Emblem. In X-COM, for example, your characters are lifeless, emotionless, they have no character or personality whatsoever. You can make as many as you want in the simple click of a button in your base, same thing for Darkest Dungeon. Sure, it is also sad to lose them as you have invested time into making them more effective in combat but in Fire Emblem they aren’t just a grunt that hits harder, all the characters have a unique design, a personality, a personal story to not only the plot but most of the time with your main characters and others as well. I’m just going over the surface of this here because in more recent titles your characters have support conversations in between battles, becoming closer, they can improve each other in battle. They can even get married and have kids, which are all unique according to how they paired up during your playthrough.
Back to Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, I have a very good time with this game not because of permadeath but in spite of it. Some may say it raises the stakes and sure it does, I won’t deny it. When you have a unit low on life, getting attacked in succession by the enemy and somehow managing to dodge each attack is in fact an amazing feeling. The thing is that when they get hit, or worse, an enemy unit with a 3% chance of a critical hit manages to land that critical hit to one of your best units is a feeling many Fire Emblem fans must have felt at some point. I can’t speak for other people’s feeling when this happens to me it is a mix of frustration, anger, regret and the only option I feel I have is to rage quit, turning the game down to try later.
I sure have heard the argument to let some units die, the game is made with that in mind. Sure it is but like I said, these characters are more than just “hitting machines”, you have invested in them and grown attached to them. Even worse if these units are trainees, units that become super weak but grow insanely strong as you work into their progression.
Even worse if they die just as they are starting to get useful.
About The Sacred Stones I do have to admit that after a certain point the game can be much easier than it is at the beginning, specially if you grind for levels but for some reason while by the end of the game the usual enemies were not putting much of a challenge the bosses were for me in a league of their own the fear of losing a unit just at the final boss of a stage was terrifying. Having to replay an entire stage just because of a single hit.
In the end all worked well. Loved the game and I’m happy to have experienced a “true” Fire Emblem experience. Well, not everything worked well, two of my three trainee units were lackluster or just bad. Guess the RNG gods didn’t smile at me for my level ups but at least Ross was so good he pretty much single handedly defeat the final boss for me.
I did say I had a “true” Fire Emblem experience, but some may say that since I played a game in which you can grind it wasn’t a “true” Fire Emblem experience and while I do disagree, those that might think that way do have a point.
So I had in my experience now three games:
Awakening: Normal difficulty – Casual Mode (no permadeath) – Levels are grindable
Fates Conquest: Hard difficulty – Casual Mode (no permadeath) – Levels are not grindable
Sacred Stones: Normal difficulty – Classic (permadeath on) – Levels are grindable
After The Sacred Stones, even if some gripes, I was pumped and went right into Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon. Here I wanted to try my hands on and experience the classic fans would relate to. Permadeath on and not able to grind for experience outside the main story.
While you could say this went badly, actually it went way better than Sacred Stones. Now, I didn’t like this game more than Sacred Stones, not by far but I think for some reason my mindset was different when I approached this game and that made my decisions to restart or not when a unit died much easier.
The first difference in that Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon is much less frustrating in regards to permadeath is that the game has some shining circles in the level in which you can use to create a save point, so you can actually be more risky in this game at times if you saved recently. Imagine spending 40 minutes on a level to have one of the best and most lovable characters Caeda (Shiida) died at the end. For me that is a restart that is even more sure if the main character Marth would die (which is an automatic fail in case you don’t know). Now thanks to these few save points, which you can only use once, at the very least come back to an earlier state but which is not the beginning of the stage.
I also had the impression that Shadow Dragon gives you much more units to add to your roster during the game and recruiting them seemed much easier to me in comparison to Sacred Stones, at least without a guide, so I had the luxury to move on as Jagen, one of the best units early on died.
The sad thing about Shadow Dragon is that I feel the characters, for the most part and with some exceptions, are mostly bland, so if they die I don’t have much of that connection I was talking about earlier. So if some units would die, as long as the best ones were still alive I would move forward.
With this I would like to say that I am done with permadeath for good. Unfortunately I can’t say that because there are still five games in the franchise that I don’t have the option to turn off permadeath that I would like to give a shot at some point.
Thankfully I found out that Genealogy of the Holy War (SNES) has an option to save in between turns, so that’s just like using savestates on an emulator. As fort the others the one I’m really anticipating a ton of frustration is Radiant Dawn but there’s no reason to worry about it for now.
With all that I have to say that with each passing day I am becoming more and more a Fire Emblem fan in spite of its permadeath origins because honestly, say may say that it defines Fire Emblem but in my opinion it is such more more than just a mechanic to make you frustrated and waste time. For me it would be the same thing as saying what defines Dark Souls is the long walk between the last bondfire you were on and the boss you plan to fight with many enemies along the way. These are much more than these annoyances (Oh, it may not annoy everyone the same way, it may not even annoy you, and if that is so, great, just my opinion).
Anyway, if you’ve read all my complains that were not as well formulated as I wanted them to be, I encourage you to give Fire Emblem a chance in case you haven’t. The recent titles have so many options on how to play them that there really there aren’t any excuses, they can be as hard or as easy as you want them to be (the same thing in regards to frustration).
Not just great strategy games but games with memorable characters, enjoyable stories and very good music.
Now if I may give a piece of advice, do start with one that there is no permadeath, please, make your life easier. The year 2020 has been hard enough and 2021 doesn’t look to be much better so be kind yourself. 😉
Mayonaka Reviews 
Radiant Dawn also has an in-chapter save, so that will probably save you a lot of frustration. Though since it’s a sequel to Path of Radiance, I’d still recommend playing PoR first. RD changes perspectives a few times so without playing PoR first, you may find yourself going “who the dickens are these people?” a lot.